If you're considering jumping the Microsoft Office ship, but are worried about the quality of the other players, read this introduction to StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.0  the open source alternatives from Sun and the open source community.

One-Minute Guide

StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are your free tickets to ride the Microsoft
Office train without actually going anywhere near the station. StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org open all the Microsoft Office formatsWord, Excel, and
PowerPoint. And you can save any file in any of those formats, too. You can
create a new Microsoft text document, spreadsheet, or set of slides without ever
using Microsoft.

Goes beyond Microsoft Office In addition, StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org open over 200 other formats. Your old AmiPro and Interleaf and
WordPerfect files, GIFs and SVG and PNG graphicsjust about anything. Not
only do you get the ability to open and edit all the files Microsoft does, but
you get a whole lot more.

StarOffice and OpenOffice.org StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are two
very similar versions of the same software. Sun took StarOffice, gave the source
code to the OpenOffice.org community, and then kept developing StarOffice
themselves. So you've got StarOffice, backed and developed by Sun
Microsytems, and OpenOffice.org, backed and developed by the OpenOffice.org open
source community. StarOffice gives support and training; OpenOffice.org has a
lot of documentation and FAQs on its site, too.

The features are pretty similar, so you can use this book with either one.
Whenever there are significant differences, we'll point them out.

What each one costs StarOffice is $75, OpenOffice.org is free.

Going from Microsoft Office to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org StarOffice
and OpenOffice.org are somewhat similar to Microsoft Office. If you're an
MS Office user, you'll still have to do some learning, but you'll have
lots of "Oh, this is the same" moments. Plus, with StarOffice and
OpenOffice.org you've got a great drawing/image editing program, Draw,
which goes way beyond the minor tools you get in Microsoft Office. Draw is an
excellent program, simpler for some than Adobe products, but with lots of power
and features.

Get started Just hit Chapter Chapter 2, Installation, on
page 19, or to learn more, read ''StarOffice
Essentials'' on page 7 or ''OpenOffice.org
Essentials'' on page 8. To see what's changed, see
''What's New in StarOffice and OpenOffice'' on page
11.